Virtual Collections

Virtual collections are logical groupings of either virtual images or virtual machines. Virtual collections represent an application topology, for example, one virtual image for a Web server, another virtual image for a database server that are used together. A virtual collection can have a test environment associated with it that describes the application topology that it represents. The function that this topic describes might not be available, depending on how lab management permissions and client access licenses have been defined for your user account. You must be integrated with an external provider, such as VMLogix or Surgient or another tool that manages virtual images and machines, to view or use virtual collections. For information about setting up the integration of the external provider application and IBM® Rational® Quality Manager, see the product documentation for the external provider application.

Virtual collections are synchronized from an external provider. You cannot manually create a virtual collection. The external provider applications provide information about a collection of images, which are visible in Rational Quality Manager. The user can annotate this collection with a test environment. The test environment describes what is created if the virtual image collection is deployed and virtual machines are created from the images in the collection. For example, when users see a virtual collection imported into Rational Quality Manager, they realize that this is their Web server test environment. Users can create a test environment that describes their Web server and add it to the virtual collection to identify it for other users.

Related tasks
Working with virtualization product integrations
Creating new test environments

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